Follow Alt Text Best Practices
Learn how to make your images accessible to users that rely on screen reading technology.
Last updated
Learn how to make your images accessible to users that rely on screen reading technology.
Last updated
In addition to following licensing and college image guidelines, you must ensure that your images are accessible to all website users. Users with disabilities often use screen reading software, to read the content aloud. When screen readers scan an image, they read the provided alt text. If you don’t include alt-text with your image, then that image will be invisible to the user.
Alt text will also act as a placeholder anytime the image doesn’t load properly.
Try to keep alt text limited to one sentence. Succinctly describe what is going on in the image. Distill it down to what matters most and keep it simple. For example, alt text for tihs image could be “A researcher using a microscope.”
Avoid using images that include lots of text. If the text in an image is important, you should include it in the alt text. Otherwise, you are depriving visually impaired people of that information.
As you can imagine, this can become tedious, so it’s best to avoid images like these:
